I remember getting into a friendly frustrating discussion with someone from their 'Contact Us' dept regarding being forced to sign up with Facebook just to comment on an article, that resulted in being told that there was no way around it. It amazed me that a site as big as TechCrunch would use such a crappy form of commenting system. I asked about the possible implementation of Disqus which I have used on my blog for a while now, but at that time, it was not going to be considered.

Glad they have come to their senses and are no longer alienating a lot of people from the discussion.

Blind leading the blind

I really wish that lobbyists/politicians would be made accountable for the dangerous scare tactics that they use to get crazy fucked up cyber security bills passed. Transparency is a must when dealing with such topics, so knowing what's 'in it for them' should be prevalent in early discussions.

Louis CK

Just got an email from him:

Hello there. I am Louis C.K. for now. You are a person who opted into my email list, when you bought my Live at the Beacon standup special. As I promised, I have left you alone for a long time. Well, those days are over. I am writing now to let you know that I am offering some more stuff on my site, which you are more than welcome to buy. What does "More than welcome" mean? Well, it means you can totally buy this stuff. Like, totally.
Okay so there are two new products. They are both audio comedy specials. One is called...
Louis CK: WORD - Live at Carnegie Hall
This is about an hour long and it's a recording of a live standup show that I did at Carnegie Hall in November of 2010 as part of a national tour I was on entitled "WORD" I've had a lot of requests from people to release that show as a speical or as a CD. I hadn't done so because a lot of the material that I did on the WORD tour, was in the second season of my show "LOUIE" on FX. But I decided since it's never been released as an entire show, and some of the material was not on my show, I'm releasing this now. I'm giving you this long and boring explaination because, as most of you know, I release about an hour or more of new standup material every year and folks can count on seeing a new show every year. This is old material, so I don't want to be a dick and pretend it isn't.
Anyway, Louis CK: WORD - Live at Carnegie hall is available for the same 5 dollars as everything will be on louisck.com. It is the same deal as before that you get 4 downloads and the file is drm free. YOu can burn it onto a CD, play it on your ipod, whatever you want. The special is broken up into separate tracks because I think that's more fun for a comedy album, but they are all just one thing you buy all at one time.
The second new thing is even older, actually. It's an audio release of "Shameless", my very first hour long standup special that I did for HBO. It was never released as an audio CD, so I asked HBO to let me offer it on this site and they agreed. They also agreed to let me offer it, the same as the rest, DRM free, for 5 dollars. Obviously I'll be sharing the Shameless money with HBO but I think it's pretty cool that they're letting this be out there unprotected like this. Shameless is also 5 dollars, drm free, and you can download it a bunch of times for the price.
Lastly, I'm offering Live at the Beacon Theater as an audio version, for those many of you who have asked for it. This is just exactly an audio version of the video special. Those of you who have already bought Live at the Beacon theater already own this. If you just return to the site louisck.com with your password, it is now live and available for you to download at no extra cost. Those of you who now buy LIve at the beacon theater for 5 dollars, will also have the audio version availbable to you. It's simply been added to the video downloads and streams you already were getting.
Later, I am going to make a version of Live at the Beacon theater, that is a separate audio special, which will be much longer. That will cost money. Because I'm an asshole. But that's later.
Also later, actually soon, I'll be putting my first feature film "Tomorrow Night' up for sale on the site. And also other things. Soon. For now. Please feel free to click on the button below, to purchase some of the new stuff, using Paypal or Amazon payments, we now accept both. Or go to louisck.com and peruse the new items. I think we have some samples there that you can check out.

You may have noticed that Louis CK LIve at the beacon theater is airing on the FX network. FX agreed to air it 10 times over the next few months. The version on FX is only 42 minutes long and we had to take out the fucks. The reason I chose to air the special on FX is that FX is my people. They gave me my show LOUIE (season 3 premieres on June 28th at 10:30pm) and they have never aired a standup special. So I thought it would be cool to let them air it and bring more people to the site who want to get the complete unexpurgated version. Also FX doesn't make me cut things for content. Just the big words (fuck, etc)

Okay. that was exhausting. Sorry. I didn't even ask you how you are. How are you? Oh yea? Oh good. That's great. What? Oh man. That's tough. I'm sorry... Oh well that sounds like you handled it well, though. So. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I know that's... yeah. Well... Just remember, time will go by and that'll just be on the list of shit that happened to you. You'll be okay. Yeah. Huh?... Oh. Really? HE DID? Oh my GOD! hahaha!! That's CRAZY! No. no. I won't tell him you told me. Of course not. Alright well... uhuh? Oh wow. yeah. Alright well.. I really gotta go. Thanks for listening. I'm glad you're basically okay. Stay in touch.

London Protest

I was at the London protest where we had about 400 - 500 people. It was a great day which hopefully bought more awareness to people. Loz Kaye (Pirate Party UK) did a great speech as did Jim Killock (Open Rights Group).
I would had liked to have seen more people come along though, but the people that did attend were great. Distributed hundreds of leaflets to people during the march explaining why we were marching and explaining ACTA.

"European directive 2000/31/EC clearly stating that ISPs may not be put under a general obligation to monitor the information they transmit and directive 2002/58/EC granting European citizens a right to privacy of communications."

When I received a letter from ACS:Law the first place I went to was http://beingthreatened.yolasite.com/ and used one of their templates, as writing a correctly and carefully worded letter is important. I still received a reply from Andrew Crossley and passed all emails and letters to my MP (Norman Baker) Andrew Crossley was very determined that I had in fact downloaded the content to which the letter was referring to (which I hadn't).I was made aware of ACS:Law via Torrent Freak and Techdirt about a year before receiving it, so wasn't worried at all by it.

What I'd love to see happen is for Amazon to say 'Fuck it. De-list all Apple products from this moment on'. A company the size of Amazon would do some financial damage as many people like getting their stuff via Amazon as there are always good deals. Pretty sure Apple would would shut the fuck up when they see that their bottom line is in jeopardy. (if only temporary)
The whole ethos and school yard bullying that Apple have is disgusting and I would love to watch that company go belly up due to them taking it too far one day.

Right back at 'cha

What I'd love to see, is a sensible judge realise what an utter load of horseshit this suit actually is and dismiss it. Then allow a class action lawsuit to start against US Copyright Group, which would hit them in a massive way financially and maybe make them think twice about trying to sue thousands of people when the only proof they have is a fucking IP address. Twats.

Usage Transparency

I signed up to BT about a year and a half ago on the Option 3 with allegedly gave me unlimited downloads and uploads. I checked their FUP and also rang the sales line. It was confirmed as completely unlimited. The amount of on-line backups I do plus the amount of pictures I take a month (weddings, Christening etc) and like to have then stored locally as well as in The Cloud (hate that term) is a lot (I shoot in RAW and don't throw them away) So was grateful that they had this option.
3 weeks into the 18 month contract I received an email and letter informing me that I had reached my 100GB limit and would now be capped.
I was pissed at this. So I went searching for the CEO's email address as I knew that the 'Help' line would be as much use as a kick in the balls. I found his email and wrote him a polite email detailing my conversation with the sales line, a link to their FUP and also the on-line chat that I had also had with the sales department prior to signing up (I had saved this as a pdf to my desktop luckily; got to love CutePDF)
2 hours later he emailed me back to say that he would let his assistant help me with the matter. It was all sorted out within another 2 hours and I was released from my 18 month contract. So if in doubt, forget the helpline and go for the top if possible. Had I of gone the 'Help line' route, things would have been very different.
It still really pisses me off that there is zero regulation regarding this and the ISP's as a whole get away with this shit, time after time.

I have now been with BE Broadband for over a year on their Pro Account (£22.44 a month with up to 24MB download speeds and 2.5MB upload speeds) I have never once received any complaints from them. I don't take the piss, just need a decent amount of bandwidth as there are 4 other people that live in the house and most of them watch TV on-line due to the fact we can only get 4 channels normally and it's a listed building so no Sky.
To my knowledge they have never, nor do they plan to ever start throttling people's connections. Their support is also crazy fast as well and when they say unlimited they MEAN unlimited and don't sneak throttle you due to a major lack of transparency on their behalf.
Fuck BT